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Orientation: Approaches to Place in Northern Irish Poetry ] 15 the counterpoint of such likewise frequently used designations as ‘the North of Ireland’, ‘the Six Counties’ and the even more clearly politically motivated ‘the Occupied Six Counties’. Encrypted in such names are various aspects of space as well as time with a clear-cut social orientation, proving the validity of the idea of space as a product rather than an a priori existing and passive category that only features as an underlying constant for human experience. The names, however, are only reflections of a situation that is generally seen as rather peculiar, especially when the broader context of the creation and the subsequent history of the province is concerned (although in this case the most recent changes concerning the composition of the population and their implications are discarded here as they fall beyond the scope of the temporal frame of the poems discussed). The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 allowed for the creation of a separate organisation of self-government for the Protestant majority of Ulster, and the subsequent decision of six Northern counties to opt out of the Free State in the December of 1922 ascertained the continued involvement of the area in the United Kingdom. Partition, however, was not the sole reason for the social situation of division in the province as it had long been sect-divided due to plantation, reaching back several centuries prior to the 20" century. The fact that Northern Ireland remained, and still is, a part of the United Kingdom, represents the continuity of a type of political arrangement that is regularly termed colonial. Eric Falci refers to Northern Ireland as a “continuing British colony”,”’ and Maureen E.R. Fadem points out, when addressing the current effects of division, that “the region was excluded from the achievement of decolonisation and stands estranged.” He also notes as causes for the persistence of tensions and violence in the province a more complex matrix of historical factors: “[p]artition was complicated, doomed to fail, some say, owing to the fact that all but six counties were decolonised and two-thirds of Ulster ‘left behind,’ as well as to the legacies of British colonialism, especially the colonial plantation of Ulster.”?* David Lloyd uses the term “partial decolonisation”*° to describe the situation of Ireland in the present, with the suggestion that the current state fits within the pattern of discontinuity that has characterised Irish culture for centuries. This condition of discontinuity has a bearing on the concept of the nation as well as on a corresponding territorial element, with Northern Ireland as a pivotal faction in the overall picture. As Fadem formulates it, “Northern Irish time is purgatorial, the time of waiting for some political Godot. Republicans and other nationalists expect reunification and a wholly sovereign United Ireland, whereas Loyalists and Unionists ?” Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966 - 2010. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 4 28 Maureen E.R. Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland. Spectral Borderlands (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4 29 Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, 16 30 David Lloyd, Counterpoetics of Modernity. On Irish Poetry and Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 21
